"Ah—um, yes," replied Roscoe Orlando vaguely. "The town is developing a number of strong talents—really, we are pushing ahead wonderfully. I—ah, in fact, I may say," he went on, with some little grandiloquence, "that I have just been the means of bringing such a talent to light myself—an absolute discovery, and one of no little importance."
"Indeed?" said Virgilia coldly.
"Yes; a young Pole—a young Bohemian—a young I-don't-know-what." Roscoe Orlando waved his fingers with a vague, easy carelessness. "His name is Prochnow. Very, very gifted. I found him living out on the West Side—incredible distance—impossible neighbourhood—starving in the midst of masterpieces," pursued Roscoe Orlando complacently. "I bought a few."
"Prochnow!" thought Virgilia angrily; "that fellow who painted Preciosa McNulty's portrait!" He had doubtless won over old Jeremiah by that stroke, and now he was running off with Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. It was little less than a landslide; she and her aunt must stop it.
"One of his pictures is in my own drawing-room," said Gibbons. "The other I have presented to our club. Such colour!" he cried, rolling his eyes. "Such composition!" he added, running his fat fingers through his whiskers. "A talent of the first order; more—an out-and-out genius!" he concluded.
Yes, it was Roscoe Orlando who had purchased Prochnow's pictures and thus enabled him to take quarters in the Burrow. They were large unwieldy things, painted in the latter days of his Viennese apprenticeship, and they had cost him cruelly for freight and storage; but he had always clung to the belief that he could sell them sometime, to somebody: at least, they would serve to show what he could do. Or rather, what he had once done and been satisfied to do. He should hardly care to do such things now; he was not ashamed of them—he had merely left them a little behind.
"Oh, Ig, Ig, Ig!" Little O'Grady had cried upon learning of all this, "why won't you be fair and above-board? Why will you be so secretive, so self-sufficient? Why didn't you tell me it was Roscoe Orlando Gibbons who had bought those pictures?"
"Why, what difference does it make?" asked the other, in wonder.
"It makes all the difference in the world—to anybody who knows this town and its people. Has nobody ever told you that Roscoe Orlando Gibbons was one of the directors of the Grindstone?"
"No."